Often cited as the moment rock music genuinely grew up. Recorded while the band had stopped touring — freeing them to think entirely in studio terms — Revolver pushed pop songwriting into territory that felt completely new: psychedelic, political, introspective, and sonically adventurous all at once. Eleanor Rigby pairs McCartney's most devastating lyric with a stark string octet. Tomorrow Never Knows closes the record with backwards tape loops and a lyric drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead — it sounds like it was made decades later. In between: Taxman, Here There and Everywhere, Yellow Submarine. Not a weak moment anywhere. Brian Wilson heard this album and immediately started work on Pet Sounds. The chain of influence that flows from Revolver is almost impossible to overstate.
